Saturday, September 06, 2008

My windows machine is having video playback problems. Anything like YouTube, anything like Media Player playback, etc. is pausing every few seconds. I mean literally pausing every 3 or 4 seconds. I've tried a variety of formats and sources - it does this with CD's too - and they all behave exactly the same way.

Secondary problem: No sound. Not from speakers, not from headphones. Front jack, back jack, same silence. Every volume setting I can find is turned up and not muted. I'm stumped.

Sound problem: Do you have a built-in sound card or a discrete sound card? If built-in, it may have been deactivated somehow--check the BIOS setup. If discrete, it may be going bad. You can also go to the Device Manager (right-click on My Computer and select PROPERTIES, then HARDWARE tab, then DEVICE MANAGER) and look for any yellow flags. A yellow flag means a hardware prob of some sort. BTW, that means it could be bad hardware or a driver problem.

Start/Stops: Maybe your resources are getting sucked up. Do a CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager, then click on the PROCESSES tab, and CPU to sort CPU usage by highest.System Idle Processes should be first; if something else is sucking up your CPU that may be the culprit. Keep in mind slightly older versions of Firefox got really bloated, really fast, and might be contributing to this kind of problem.

I recently upgraded Firefox (which I'm not terribly impressed with so far), and that may be when the problem started. I rebooted a couple of times while trying to work the sound problem, and now the video seems to be ok again.